I didn't say that Eastern European Jews thought that they were Ubermenschen (althoug religious ones presumably did think they were chosen by God). I said they weren't Russians (or Ukrainians, or Poles, or whatever). They're not. Any more than e.g. the large Russian population in Latvia is Latvian, or the Han Chinese in Tibet are Tibetan, or the Kurds in Iraq are Arabs.
I think part of the problem here may be linguistic in origin.
First, the Russian word "evrei" is usually translated as "Jew." However, it doesn't actually mean that. It refers specifically to the Jews of the Pale and their descendents, that is, the Yiddish-speaking nation. It does not refer to religion or to other ethnic groups practicing Judaism, except by vague extension. I don't know, but I assume this is the case in Ukrainian and probably Polish as well (Wojtek?).
Second, there is a likely confusion between nation and titular nation. The Russian Federation only has a titular nationality in English, which does not differentiate between the words "Rossisskii" and "Russkii." "Rossisskii" means "relating to a member of one of the ethnic groups indigenous to the RF," but this is too long to translate, so it just becomes "Russian." "Russkii" means "ethnic Russian." It is the "Rossisskaya Federatsiya," not the "Russkaya Federatsiya, "the federation of peoples of the RF," not "the federation of Russians." Russia is not the country of the Russians as Germany is the country of the Germans or France the country of the French. That is, it is not a nation-state.
----- Original Message ---- From: Marv Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> There is no contradiction here. I'm not quarreling with the distinctive national characteristics of the East European Jews, with their own language, religion, history, and institutions. I'm objecting to the inference on this thread that they were an insular people with an innate sense of superiority who would not or could not develop wider allegiances - which was patently not the case. As you know, the Soviet Union was a multinational federation, comprising Russians, Armenians, Georgians, Kazakhs, Ukranians, Tajiks, etc. The Jews arguably identified more strongly with the USSR than members of some of the other national minorities. This was also the case outside of Eastern Europe, in the more bourgeois and cosmopolitan Jewish communities in Austria-Hungary, Germany, France, and Britain, where, like all second and subsequent generation immigrants, the Jews shed the language and culture if not the religion of their ancestors and sought to assimilate into
their host countries. W! here they did not succeed in doing so, it was not because they were unable to transcend an overriding loyalty to their own "nation" or a sense of themselves as a "chosen people", but because the church and right-wing political parties and demagogues would not permit it.
I'll address James' comments later.
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